Sam Altman Returns to OpenAI. Now What? — With Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie is the CEO of Box. He joins Big Technology Podcast to look forward at the AI field now that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has returned. In this episode, we discuss: 1) Whether this is good for the AI field 2) Should we actually be concerned with Ai safety? 3) Whether the saga is over? 4) How companies are insulating themselves in case of further eruptions 5) The downsides of switching off of OpenAI 6) Does the open source movement rise now? 7) Can OpenAI still lobby effectively with a new board? 8) The EA vs. e/acc fight 9) How Sam let this happen --- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sam Altman is back at OpenAI. But does that mean everything is right in the Microsoft and OpenAI universe? And what happens next to the AI field? Aaron Levy joins us to break it all down, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, where we've somehow become a daily show about the travails and the next chapters of the OpenAI saga. Maybe this is the final one.

• 1:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're here today with Box CEO Aaron Levie, who seems to always be here when things are going insane in the AI world. And maybe that's just a function of this industry, but we definitely have a live one to discuss today. Aaron, welcome to the show.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Thanks. Good to be on, and I do like that I get to talk about all the drama with you all the time.

• 1:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, we love having you on, and we appreciate you being here in a very hectic moment in the tech world. Let me start with this. Is this good for AI?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 2:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Um, I think, um, uh, and, and, and I want to be very clear that, uh, anything I'm, I'm saying is purely on reading, you know, the, the outside reports on, on what's going on. So, so some of this is, is a bit conjecture. Um, but if you take, if you, if you take, um, if you look at kind of what has been talked about as, as what led to the events, um, where, where Sam had to depart OpenAI, um, I think actually, I think this conversation on, on, you know, sort of AI, uh, safety and doomerism actually does need to come to a head eventually. And, um, I think we have to get to a point where we're talking about AI safety in much more, I think, reasonable, practical terms.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Um, I think we have let, um, uh, this is all, all just sort of my personal view. I think we've let sort of the conversation move more toward, um, you know, really extreme, uh, very like, like, just insanely low probability existential risk type conversations. And when you have that at a board level, and, and especially if there's multiple board members that are starting to, or always have believed that, that, you know, AI represents an existential risk to humanity and, and they're in this position where they're going to save humanity if, if, uh, if they stop something from happening, that is, that is clearly going to lead to just undesirable outcomes,

• 3:27Speaker 01

  um, in an organization whose mission is to, is to build, you know, AI and advance the state of AI. Um, you, you eventually will not be able to reconcile those views, um, at, at some point. And so I, I think to some extent, this was probably always going to have to, um, you know, blow up at, at some stage. And, and this was just the moment that it did. And I think it's going to lead to some much more healthy conversations about, about, you know, how do we advance AI, do it in a safe way, but let's start to get a little bit more grounded in how we talk about some of these topics.

• 3:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think OpenAI let some of this safety stuff get out of hand on its own? I mean, Sam was talking recently about how it's good that the board can remove him if they think he's taking this in the wrong direction.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  I think that, that, you know, it's interesting, right? So, so I think actually that's a very good sentence to say, because it's, it's showing that there's accountability and that you are not, you know, some, you know, kind of, you can't run the organization in a dictatorial way and have full autonomy and there's no oversight. Like, that, that's actually like, like, you would want a CEO to say that about their organization. I think what we're learning, though, is, is that, is that it wasn't a board that was, was diverse enough in opinions and, and experienced enough in some cases on, on how you operate a large-scale organization, how you make thoughtful decisions at a, you know, at a board level.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And, and that, that actually turned out to be the problem. And he probably, you know, at the time of saying that, didn't predict that that was, you know, something that, that would be, you know, would be, would be, you know, plausible as a scenario. I think he was probably imagining saying that is like, if I truly am kind of, you know, running out of control and going crazy, the board has the ability to, to remove me. And that's a, that's a safety valve, you know, to the extent that people think there's risk out there. I don't think that his intent was, was, they would do that, you know, preemptively by 10, by 10 years before we've, we've sort of shown any evidence that we're doing things in an unsafe, or, you know, type way.

• 5:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I've come down pretty hard against the doomers. Even before this, I wrote a story, maybe I think it was last week, about how the AI doomers are finally getting their, their comeuppance. And I did get some feedback that said, I, I think it was kind of interesting to hear it, that said, basically, like, what if you're discounting something that's serious? And of course, I don't think that, I personally don't think that we're like heading towards this AI doom scenario. But like, you do hear the way that Sam has been talking about the stuff that they've developed. Let me, and I gave this, I spoke about this on one of our emergency shows as it was going on, but to Lorene Powell Jobs, he said, "I think people have in their mind how much better the model will be next year, and it's remarkable how much different it is."

• 6:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, I'm kind of curious, like, do you feel like these, these fears are completely overblown? And given the acceleration and the trajectory that the technology is moving, is it possible that the folks who are concerned about safety might have a point?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  I think that it's, first of all, I like the, you know, I, I, I don't really like this term so much and how, and how it generally gets used, but, but I like the marketplace of ideas. Like, I actually think, I actually think we should be constantly debating, you know, AI and AI safety and where the risk is and whatnot. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting intellectual, you know, type of conversation. And, and I have friends that are on extreme ends of, of, of the AI safety debate. That, but, but then that's still different from board governance and, and you, you're literally on the board of directors of a company whose mission it is, and a nonprofit whose mission it is to advance the state of AI.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  And, and so then at some point you have to be, we have to live in the real world and be practical about the implications of, of that. Like, don't, don't join that board if your views are what you're doing is, is that harmful to society. If, if you really deeply have that, that innate fear, like, that's just the wrong board of directors to be on. So, it, it, and so like, like, you know, I, I, like, there's an alternative universe where on Thursday night, the board members that, that were thinking that OpenAI was moving too fast, they should have just resigned in protest. Done a public, done a public post about why they resigned, and then we should debate about how fast OpenAI is moving.

• 7:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  But you don't think that this, that this, that we're like at a point where the technology is potentially threatening to humanity?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I, I, I can't imagine how we get from what we're looking at today to threatening to humanity. And so we are, we are like to, like, complete step function discontinuous breakthroughs away from, from that. We are, we are at the stages of like, of like, we, we have some productivity gains across a few sectors right now with generative AI. And, and we're in the very early stages of trying to figure out the implications of how to incorporate this into. Into our, you know, into our, you know, software in a, in a meaningful way. There's, there's simply nothing that relates to what we're looking at now and something that is sort of humanity ending.

• 8:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So looking ahead, Sam's back at OpenAI right now. Is this really the end of this? Like, we don't have a board seat for Microsoft. We don't have the results of whatever investigation is going to happen. The board is apparently like, it consists of like, it's a hilarious board right now. What is it like Larry Summers, Adam DeAngelo and Brett Taylor? And, and so, so do you think this is really the end? I mean, they're supposed to fill it with nine more people. It's amazing you even got back in there. What do you think about it?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's almost by definition not over, but I don't, I think the, the dramatic part period has, I think if you like looked at the Google Trends graph of like how much drama and how many people are following the OpenAI saga. I think we're going to see a dramatic, you know, sort of, you know, drop from this point. Simply because I think between Brett and Adam and Larry, you know, their charter is very clear at this point. It's, you know, Bill, I, I, again, this is from what I'm reading, build out a, a strong board that can govern, you know, OpenAI. And, and you can almost just like already predict the kinds of names of people that would be on that board.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  It'll be operators, it'll be, it'll be policy people and, you know, it'll, it'll be a, you know, a, I can only predict a very well, you know, constructed board of, of, you know, strong, strong leaders. And, and then their job will be to, to provide accountability and, and sort of oversight of the organization. And, and Sam and Greg and the team will go and build AI. And that seems like, you know, kind of almost everything's back to normal. But probably with a, hopefully a clear charter of, of the organization, you know, on a go forward basis.

• 10:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you and I had emailed when this was all getting started and, you know, talking about having you on here when things resolve. And when Sam agreed to go to Microsoft, I was like, is it time to email Aaron? It just felt like the ball was still up in the air. And I, that's when, once he decided he's back, like, I was like, okay, maybe this is the time. I hope this is really it.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Uh, this feels, this feels, this feels, I mean, the, the fact that you have the, uh, either forced or voluntary resignation of the board members that, that appear to be at the center of a lot of this. I think we're now entering a new chapter of, uh, of, of this. And, and I think it was very clear in the process, the quote unquote leverage that Sam had, where basically the entire organization was willing to go over to Microsoft. So, so at some point, you know, it, it becomes kind of semantics, which is like, well, what, you know, what, what is OpenAI? If there's only 20 people left and, and, you know, a chat GPT domain, if everything moves over to Microsoft and they can just go replicate the same thing, then you kind of lose all your leverage. Cause all you've really done is, is, you know, you've gotten rid of a nonprofit organization essentially.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so you don't, there's not a lot of, you don't have a lot of negotiating leverage in that case. So, um, so I think we're kind of, now that we've seen the, all the pieces on the, on the, uh, on the board, I think it becomes pretty, um, uh, a much more boring saga at this point, which is a good thing. So.

• 11:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay. So I want to spend the bulk of our time together talking about what's next. Because obviously like this is this seismic moment and there's like a very tidy narrative. A lot of people have wrapped up that it's great news for OpenAI and Microsoft. And I'm questioning that a little bit. It seems like a lot of people are now kind of evaluating their, um, their relationship with OpenAI. Not saying they're leaving, but saying they're like, wow, have I locked my company into the OpenAI API? And like, what can I do to make sure that I am protected in case something like this happens? What do you think?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first of all, I think, other than a very fast-moving startup where you just don't have any time to, you know, have have multiple paths that you're investing in, I think most organizations at scale have already imagined a world where they have to be, they have to have optionality on where their AI comes from. Any CIO we talk to, any CTO of a, you know, let's say a SaaS company above a couple hundred million in revenue, and you talk to them about their AI strategy, either they've already done a mix of investments in AI, they're doing something with Llama, they're playing with Anthropic, they've done something with Google, or they've at least been building an architecture that supports that.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  So I think that, you know, that optionality is already existing. But OpenAI has the really important feature, which is they have the the most advanced models at the lowest cost per token, and that is a that is a competitive weapon and a competitive advantage that that does not seem to be slowing down at this point. And so, and so, you know, despite all of the events of the past week, that advantage is is just an objective advantage, and these are not, you know, these are not, at this moment, yet, thus far, commoditized components that you can just sort of swap in and out. Maybe they will get there in five years from now. I actually would prefer that they do because we always like to be able to have flexibility

• 13:49Speaker 01

  with our underlying suppliers, but they're not swappable right now, and OpenAI does have the most advanced and the lowest cost per token models from our testing. And so I think the implication is is simply just that, that, you know, hopefully there will continue to be leapfrogs by other vendors, Google and Amazon and Anthropic and Meta. But but the reason why I, you know, at least I personally felt like it was super important to have the OpenAI, you know, piece resolved, is they do have the best technology. And so it would be very unfortunate to lose that and have to go to something that is more, you know, less advanced and then thus, you know, produce a less, you know, high quality experience for our customers.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  So I, that's why I really liked the resolution with, with what we landed on.

• 14:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So let me know if I'm getting this wrong, but you do have this OpenAI integration where people can effectively chat with their documents, right?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so you can't, you feel today that you can't really swap that out for an Anthropic, for instance?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Uh, we totally could. Uh, I'm talking about, I'm talking about very small subtle differences, but, but, but I, you know, in the most objective measurement, OpenAI is, is in the lead. And so we could, of course, you know, introduce slightly, you know, more degraded functionality in, in a pinch. But I prefer an outcome where OpenAI, you know, continues to, to execute as, as, as, as we've seen.

• 15:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So are you building now or are you preparing now to be in a place where you're effectively model agnostic? Or are you there already where like you can very quickly switch?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  We, we are model agnostic.

• 15:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 15:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  What are you hearing from, I mean Anthropic's out there, Inflection's there, they must be like right now making the very serious sales pitch to try to get others on. I mean, what, what are you hearing from them?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so I, I, I mean, because it's only been a couple of days, um, I, I probably can't sort of yet, uh, synthesize what I, what, what, you know, their pitches have done or what, how that's changed. I would say, you know, interestingly in something like Anthropic, and I have a lot of respect for, for their advancements and, and their models are incredibly strong, to be very clear. In the case of Anthropic, uh, you know, interestingly, uh, you know, they, they are, they are a safety first organization, which is fantastic. Again, in that sort of idea of marketplace of ideas, you want, you want different companies trying out different things.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  But it's not a hundred percent obvious that they would not have the same kind of board, uh, you know, type event, um, as OpenAI at some point if, if they've.

• 16:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  They could have the same thing.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like for the first time ever, like I actually am like, oh, actually, I would want to see your board of directors. Before, before, you know, telling all of our customers to go rely on your, your, your product. Like, I didn't realize this was a, a, a, a sort of a, a, an area of risk previously. And now it's obviously very, very apparent that it is in this space.

• 16:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  I had this CEO on, on LinkedIn, drop a comment on a post that I wrote today, and I thought it was very interesting. He said, "We have a proprietary AI engine for internal corporate data, plus OpenAI for public data. I changed that strategy last week after the fiasco emerged to look at other point solutions in this space, such as Anthropic, which looks okay for now. I've changed and I will not be changing back. I'm disappointed as we put a lot of effort into and cost into OpenAI, but you cannot run a solution stacked faced with the circus and held ransom every time something goes wrong or people don't agree. It is really bad and I will not solely rely on OpenAI. It's too risky." That you think that's going to be the mentality for, for others?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I think that, again, the, I, I think that's a good mentality. There's, again, there's upper limits of, of what, of then how that actually works. Because you can be model agnostic, but if one model is, is literally superior for your use case, then you still are gonna, you're still gonna default to, to the best model. And then, and then really what you're saying is that in a, in a, you know, in a, you know, kind of nuclear scenario, you can downgrade to some other model, but that's not like your default path. And that, that's, that's actually just good business continuity in general. I think, you know, even when you're thinking about purely your infrastructure, you know, if one, if one data center zone goes down, you go down to, you go to another.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And that could actually be an entirely different vendor in some cases. So I think AI, you know, will have a similar characteristic as you incorporate AI into your products. But there are going to be subtle differences of, of then, you know, the product experience as you, as you kind of downshift to another AI model.

• 18:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, okay. And now I'm going to get to the open source thing. So I did post this on Substack, you know, my thoughts about the move to model agnosticism. And someone took it one step further, which is that, and they said it this way, they said, if you're a company that fine tuned OpenAI models for your product, this weekend or this past week, may lead you to switch to open source foundation models. Basically, that if you needed any level of customizability, you may kind of say, well, screw it. Like, we're not going to risk any company with any board, kind of like what you pointed out. We're going to go open source, we're going to, you know, tune the model that that works for us. And that indicates that there'll be a rise of open source development. What do you think?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  That that actually, you know, so open source is the is the best antidote to, and the best, you know, counterbalance to, you know, any kind of private provide technology. So provided technology. So so I'm in general, always a favor of open source. I think what we've seen from open source is still not as advanced as as some of the proprietary services. But this event, this event is, you know, just one of like, an infinite set of reminders of why it's always more ideal if you can control your technology. Nothing can ever be ripped out

• 19:52Speaker 01

  from under you, under any circumstance, you know, kind of with some asterisks. And and so, and so I like, I would always, if I if I always had the choice of the same technology, closed or open source, I will always choose open source. Today, that is not yet a choice that that is is realistic, just because, again, where the state of the models are.

• 20:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's where you kind of get into the talent question, right? OpenAI had always been able to attract these top flight researchers because it had this dual promise of pursue AGI, but do it like, in a way that you could feel safe with, you know, consciously because of this special board. Now, the board's going to look a lot more like a standard corporate board. And it might give companies that are trying to develop open source models a leg up, because they could be like, hey, listen, like, at least this is like publicly available, open source, you're contributing to the greater good. In fact, already today, Yann LeCun, who's the chief AI scientist at Meta, is amplifying this message and basically, you know, all but telling people to come over to Meta, and that Meta could be the big winner here. What's your perspective?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, you know, I think in the history of software and technology, we always have, we always have some yin and yang of a great proprietary platform and then somebody who counter positions that with an open platform. And we had it with Android and iPhone, we've had it with Linux and Windows and other platforms. We have it in Oracle versus MySQL. We've had it in buying kind of proprietary infrastructure and then Facebook's open data center, you know, design efforts. So there's almost inevitably always a closed versus open source, you know, battle in technology.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And in each kind of product category or class of product, there's sometimes a different winner. So in my personal life, I use, you know, mostly Apple products because that vertical integration that they provide means that you usually have better security or better user experience. But in our data center design, we almost always want open source, you know, infrastructure services because of our ability to control that, you know, control upgrades, you know, get the power of the community developing on it. And so, you know, AI is one of these technologies, which is how much does it benefit from the vertical integration? That's an open question.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  How much does it benefit from the pure kind of scale and flywheel effect of the company that gets strongest can spend the most on GPUs, which can train the biggest models, which can then have, you know, the better AI, which then gets more revenue and then that becomes a flywheel? You know, right now, you know, Facebook is sort of doing this, they're somewhat subsidizing the whole effort without kind of like obvious monetization. Whereas when Google did this with Android, they were going to monetize it through effectively search and advertising.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And so, so I, I mean, I love that Meta is, is, is investing so much in, in open source AI. They, they obviously benefited from probably their ad, you know, algorithms or whatnot. But, but like, it's probably hard for them still to compete with, with, you know, with OpenAI on some dimensions because OpenAI has a tremendous amount of, of, of focus. They have a tremendous amount of resources to attack this problem. And clearly they have, you know, some of the best talent in the world working on it. So, um, so, but like, but I think, you know, again, if you look at this in 10 years from now or 20 years from now, I, you, you'd almost always believe that open source would be able to catch up just because we've, we've seen that in almost every other, um, era of technology.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  But there could also be some idiosyncrasies about this where, where the commercial, um, you know, version is able to always sort of stay ahead, uh, for, for some, for some set of reasons. And so I, I would just say like, this one is like

• 23:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Too confusing to predict at this point.

• 23:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where's Google in all this? I mean, we keep hearing about this Gemini model, it's nowhere to be seen.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Google is, you know, Google, I would, I would normally think of as in the, in the, it's actually, you know, interesting because Google usually will do the counter strategy to whatever the incumbent strategy is. That's sort of their, their typical path of disruption. So, so, um, you know, in theory, they should be the, they should be the meta of this situation doing the open source. Um, but, uh, but they, they obviously haven't, haven't pursued that path. So, um, which kind of leaves them, you know, somewhere in between these, these approaches. And, and I think we're all, you know, equally waiting on the Gemini, uh, launch and, and we'll just see kind of what that looks like and, and where it's at.

• 24:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sam Altman's sort of made the rounds in Washington and around the world, uh, and been a very effective lobbyist for the regulation and the safeguards that he wants because he's had this company at his back that's been this nonprofit AI safety focused company. Can he still do that under a new structure? I mean, he's going to lose some of the sheen and credibility you'd imagine that he brought beforehand.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I don't, I mean, I don't know that they've changed the nonprofit element. Do you know if that's the case?

• 24:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, not, no, the corporate structure isn't going to be different, but like, we all know that it's going to be very different, a very different board.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, in terms of the people on there and like the Microsoft Association, that's like, no more surprises.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, I, I guess I never, I never, I mean, I don't, I don't know how like, you know, policy engines think, but like, I never saw.

• 25:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I never saw that their board was the reason why I could trust that organization. I, I, I trusted them more because they have a working product with leaders that I, I generally understand their motivations. They have the most advanced technology. They have the best researchers. Um, and so, um, and so as a result of this change, I would say, I would say, you know, I, I would actually say, um, I mean, if actually, if anything, um, Sam's whole, whole sort of commentary is probably even more credible because, because we've.

• 25:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  They did fire him.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  They did fire him. So like, like he clearly is, he works at the, you know, at, at the, at the mercy of the board. Um, but, uh, but I would probably trust the decisions to fire him much more with a much more stable, um, organized, thoughtful board of directors.

• 26:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you know what the story is behind this war between effective altruists and these, uh, e-accelerationists or effective accelerationists? For the life of me, Aaron, I'm trying to piece it together. It's bananas.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Uh, I think I understand it. What, what, what's your take?

• 26:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't know. I mean, so here, I'll, I'll just give my understanding. I think there are these, you know, these effective altruists, which tend to like, you know, want to be very cautious about the development of AI and then the accelerationists who are like build as fast as possible. Like it's basically like, you know, the OpenAI board of, of last week against Marc Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto. Is that right? Like, and how, how big of a factor are these factions within Silicon Valley?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Um, so I, well, first of all, I think like, you know, in a very simplistic way, I think you just described it. So I think you do fully understand it. Cool.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Relief. Well, and, and, and like the subtleties are like, I think the, I think there's one camp, um, and I don't want to like, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'll be label free for a second. So that way I don't, you know, step in any landmines. I think there's a camp that sort of subscribes to, hey, like, let's slow down AI progress. And, um, and that'll give us time to figure out how we can make it more safe. Um, and, and then there's another camp which says like, like A, like, that's not even really clear if that makes any sense. Like what, what, like, how does one, how does one like decide what's the right speed? Like, should we type the code fa- like slower?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Should we, should we just arbitrarily put fewer GPUs to work? Like what, like, like, it's a very, it's a very, it's sort of like antithetical to everything else we do in, in technology progress. Which is when you get to the next step, you learn more information. So you actually want to get to the next step as quickly as possible. So then you get to the next step and so on. And then, and so then that, that other camp is sort of like, well, well, actually AI is actually a good thing for society. So let's actually accelerate as much as we can to be able to, to get there. And oh, by the way, along the way, we'll learn what's not safe or what's not working. And, and the ecosystem will continue as we always have in the past, you know, you know, many decades of technology will continue to build the right safeguards. Um, as we go along, but oh, by the way, like, we don't need to be fearful for our AI future.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  So, so that's, that's also why we can just have this underlying sort of rate of acceleration. Um, and that, that's, you know, how I generally view the two camps. Um, and I think that the, you know, it's interesting, I, I actually probably a week ago, um, I would have, I would have sort of said, hey, yeah, these are like academic conversations. That like talk about at dinner and, and like, you know, these are like, these are just the intellectual fun debates of, of Silicon Valley. Obviously it turns out that these things are much more significant and, and real in, you know, at, at the board level of, of these AI labs. Um, and I, I would not have predicted that. So.

• 29:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Just one thing about AI safety, like, one of the things that I saw, I mean, I had an AI founder who was basically DM me and said, "Economics always win." That even if we had like an existential risk with AI, if OpenAI just stopped producing their thing, their technology, like, the people that invested in them and the employees with money on the line, would find a way to override whatever safety was built into their structure. What do you think about that?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Well, the reason why this is hard is my brain has not yet been able to, like, my brain hasn't been able to click into what is the actual specific fear that people are worried about.

• 29:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  And then why that fear, if that fear even gets remotely true, we're not even like talking about like capitalism like level, like, like, you know, intervention, we're talking about government intervention. Like, if AI literally is doing things that kill people, then, then like, you know, Josh Kushner will not be able to override that, you know, you know, because he did a tender round, that's like literally where the FBI is gonna show up, and they're gonna be like, "What have you guys been building?" So, so, so like, I don't, like, that's why I don't know that like two or three people on a board of directors need to sort of preemptively save the world, because they've, they've sort of extrapolated some crazy set of events that are gonna play out in 10 years

• 30:25Speaker 01

  from now, based on the decision Sam's doing right now. Like, like, if, if it gets that far, which, for everything I'm looking at, I don't see how it does, but if it does get that far, then, that's like, this is just like above your pay grade, like, this is a, this is a different level type crisis and problem that we're dealing with.

• 30:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, last question for you. Sam Altman seems pretty capable, I'm sure you've spent time with him, how do you think he let this happen?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Um, I think, so, he's insanely capable, and incredibly competent, and, you know, obviously, an incredible entrepreneur, I think that...

• 31:06Speaker 01

  I think like other board drama that we've seen in history, I think, I think sometimes you can maybe misunderstand or get out of step with or not totally, not totally see some of the, you know, have some blind spots of where board members have kind of evolved to. And I think even the world's best entrepreneurs, you know, can run into that. So, so I don't, you know, I would just say that, I would say this, this can happen to the literal, you know, best, best, you know, operators on the planet.

• 31:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Aaron Levie, thanks so much for making time. Always learn so much from you from our conversations. Great having you on.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Good chatting. See you, man.

• 31:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Awesome. Take care. Thanks, everybody for listening. We'll be back on Friday with another show breaking down the news. Until then, we'll see you next time. And thanks for listening. We'll see you on Friday on Big Technology Podcast.

• 32:02Speaker 02

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